Nissin Demae Sesame à la Wikimedia Commons

Tagged: Seaweed, Nissin, Ham, Egg, Cheese, Vegetable oil flavour

It's about time we did some actual, proper Ramen Science on this blog, and break the Nongshim curse of the past few posts. Well, mostly.

Remember how I said last post about reading Wikipedia about the food I'm eating while I'm eating it? Well, that has put a peculiar picture in my path.

Is this normal and I'm just out of touch? I don't hang out with a lot of other people who make their own ramen bowls. Image used under CC-0 from Wikimedia Commons, source linked above.

Now, I've seen sheets of seaweed propped up against the sides of the bowl, I've even seen slices of meat, but not quite deli ham slices like that. But cheese? Reader, don't believe for a second that I haven't had cheese with my noodles before, but I didn't think anybody else did it like that, especially not a whole Kraftaesque slice sitting up on the side of the bowl. Of course, I had to try it.

I once again reached in blind into my Ramen Science cardboard box full of noodle packets and found an old reliable friend, the Sesame flavour Nissin Demae Ramen. Yes, this made me do the thing where I look up what Demae means and it turns out it's a term to mean food delivery, in a way that has been practised since the Edo period in Japan! That explains the little delivery kid on the package, and now you know too.

To somewhat replicate the Wikimedia picture, I grabbed the closest matching components from our fridge. The ham slices we have are "wafer thin", so I had them folded up to give them a fighting chance of staying upright, and my cheese of choice is a lovely cheddar with chili bits. The egg is, well, an egg.

I start by preparing the noodles together with the seaweed. In go the flavour powder and sesame oil provided, with enough boiling water to just about cover the noodles. Once the noodles start to soften up, I give everything a good stir and crack the egg into the middle of the bowl. To properly cook the egg, the bowl goes straight into the microwave.

Now, I've experimented in the past with microwaving egg on noodles like this, and my findings are that microwaves are really inconsistent at cooking an egg. Sometimes I'll put it on for 30 seconds and it comes out rock hard with the chalkiest yolk, sometimes it takes a full 2 minutes for it to start to look edible. Since the microwave I'm using today works in 30 second increments, I put it in for that much and check in between each time. In the end, this egg went for 3 cycles until the whites started to cook, so a minute and a half total. After nearly searing my fingers taking the bowl out of the microwave, I carefully place the ham and cheese slices along the edge of the bowl. It's gotta look good for the camera after all.

This, my friends, is decadence.

I was extremely giddy getting ready to eat this one. The cheese very quickly started to melt, which I love, because it makes for delightfully creamy noodles. The egg yolk, as runny as safely possible, coated the noodles in liquid gold. Even the amount of water left in as broth was damn near perfect. Nissin is the brand of instant noodles I grew up eating the most, so they hold an incredibly dear comfort food place in my heart. The noodles themselves have the same fairly distinctive and nostalgic flavour to me, even to this day. All in all I was swept away by this bowl of noodles, to the point I kept burning my mouth because I couldn't wait for it to cool down to keep eating it.

That being said, if I were to do this again there's a few things I would change. For one, I was a bit greedy with the ham slices because I thought they wouldn't be enough with how thin they were. One less slice would've been fine. The cheese, conversely, I couldn't get enough of. Another slice would bring the creaminess up a notch and add a much needed spiciness from the chili peppers. And as is often the case with noodle packs, I feel like there wasn't quite enough sesame oil there. The flavour was fantastic, but most of it wasn't of sesame. I would've definitely liked to put in a couple more drops from a bottle.

Meal Components

The Scientific Method

• Get inspired by a picture on the internet you happen to come across.
• Bring out your favourite unsuspecting noodle block.
• Prepare the noodles as normal with any other dehydrated additions.
• Once noodles start to soften, crack open an egg in the bowl and microwave to cook. (1m30 @ 900W, your mileage may vary)
• Add slices of ham and cheese propped up on the sides of the bowl.
• Enjoy!

I deliberated for quite a while if this would dethrone Tom Yum in the ranking. I almost thought it should, and it probably would be a more clear winner if it had any more spice to it, but in the end I decided (for now anyway) that whatever takes first place should be something that stands on its own merits without my meddling. In either case, it's nice to see something make the top of the list for a change.